8 - Future Directions

Summary

At the risk of sounding cliché, I must begin this concluding chapter with an admonition (to myself as well as others): predicting the future is risky business. That's especially true when one tries to speculate about the future reputation of an author. Tastes—and critical methodologies—change over time, and works that lend themselves to one form of critical analysis may prove of little use to scholars adopting new methodologies. Additionally, what scholars do with texts is often guided by their own critical bias. As Robert Fraser observed more than two decades ago, “We have grown used to checking the literature of a century ago against ideologies which lie midway in time between us and its creation” (1998, 4). He explains how recent psychological theories, particularly those of Lacan, as well as feminist and postcolonial approaches have shaped readings of literary texts, including Doyle’s. “The question, Fraser asks sagely, “is whether such techniques of interpretation disclose deep structures within the work, or whether they simply encourage us to acclimatize late Victorian literature to our own cultural ecology” (4).

The preceding chapters reveal that, in the past three decades especially, Doyle's works have attracted critics’ attention—although the portrait of him and his fiction is not always flattering. Nevertheless, what emerges from a consideration of recent publications (from 1991, say, until the present) suggests that, even though commentary on Doyle's detective fiction continues to dominate academic scholarship, Doyle may have finally escaped the shackles that tied him to Holmes for nearly a century and obscured his achievements in other genres. A look at a sampling of criticism published in the past few years may give a hint of what might be expected to appear in print in the coming decade or so.

Recent Scholarly Publications

It seems likely that scholarly interest in Doyle's work will continue, and, if recent publications are any indication, new publications will contain additional insight into works outside as well as inside the Holmes canon. Most promising is an essay collection, Re-Examining Arthur Conan Doyle (2021), edited by Nils Clausson, which brings together contributions by scholars associated with Doyle criticism for decades.